


Black Blood Red Kiss

by Vorcha_Girl



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gratuitous Smut, Love, Nightmares, Oral Sex, Psychological Horror, Sex, Shameless Smut, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 11:59:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17324600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vorcha_Girl/pseuds/Vorcha_Girl
Summary: Harry Carlyle is plagued by nightmares of what might have been; of black blood and screaming, and the death that the woman he loves, Sara Ryder, almost met. Luckily, Sara knows just what to do to take his mind off his nightmares, and how to turn his dreams to more pleasant things, like the touch of her hands, the heat of her skin, and her red, red kiss.





	Black Blood Red Kiss

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MellowCorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MellowCorn/gifts).



>   
>    
> 
> 
> A/N - I was very lucky to have the pleasure of working with the incredibly talented Seokanori for the Reverse Big Bang. Her image of the Pathfinder wounded on Havarl was very inspiring. It was a beautiful image, and I immediately thought of her lover, Harry Carlyle, being wracked by nightmares and of Sara comforting him when he woke up. And yes, by comforting, I do mean in the smuttiest way possible. Thank you so much to JulesHawke for beta reading! You're a gem!
> 
> Seokanori is truly talented and genuinely wonderful to work with, and she ended up drawing a few other images based on my fic, which I hope you enjoy! ^_^ You can see her art masterpost on Tumblr [here](http://seokanori.tumblr.com/post/181973300291/mass-effect-reverse-big-bang-2018-2019-hey-guys)!

* * *

 

_Screaming._

_The dream always starts with screaming._

_Never with a teasing smile or bedroom eyes, or even a red kiss._

_But with screaming._

 

* * *

 

Habitat 7 swirled around Harry in a nightmare landscape of twisted wreckage, alien fronds and nose-wrinkling acrid smoke. He stumbled, trying to get his bearings as he turned on the spot, looking for Sara. Somehow, in the confusion of the alien attack on their position, he's lost sight of Sara, of the Pathfinder, of everyone.

And now all he could hear was that awful distant _screaming_.

A feminine giggle caught his attention and he almost cricked his neck turning as a figure, phantom-like and half-obscured in smoke, danced across his line of site. There one minute, gone the next.

“Sara?” he moved into the billowing cloud of grey that poured from the downed shuttle. “Are you hurt?”

Another giggle was his only answer as the smoke swallowed him up, grey clouds obscuring the world and cutting him off. Blindly, he moved forward, hands outstretched, seeking the giggling figure who teased him in the smoke, always one step ahead. He could just make her out, always out of reach, dancing and giggling, egging him on.

“Sara, this isn’t funny, people are hurt.”

The figure, shadowy and semi-solid, waited just ahead of him in the grey. It looked like Sara’s outline, lithe and dangerous. He reached out a hand, unable to work out why she wouldn’t reply to him, but just as he went to touch her, the shadow melted away again, laughing as the smoke billowed away on the winds and the air cleared.

She was gone.

The screaming grew louder.

Harry swallowed hard as he tried to locate the source of those screams. Was it a woman screaming? A man? Was it Sara? A violent crack of lightning cleaved the path in front of him, knocking him back as it ripped the ground in two; the air humming with electricity. Rocks, boulders, and whole mountains tumbled end over end in the sky, floating high above in an alien world that seemed to have been turned upside down and inside out.

The clouds and rocks spun crazily, whirling impossibly fast, and he forced himself to look away as the spinning sky seemed to almost pull him off his feet. He had the crazy thought that if he looked for too long into the storm he might lose touch with the ground for real and be sucked bodily into the sky. He closed his eyes and counted to ten.

_One. Two. Three. Fo-_

“Harry? Harry help me!”

Sara’s voice, high and tight with fear, broke his concentration and his eyes shot open. He caught a flash of white and blue armour from the corner of his eye, of her long brown hair trailing in the wind, then she was gone. He had a moment to wonder why the hell she had taken her helmet off, how she could breath, before the screaming started again and he forgot everything except finding her.

_Sara was screaming._

_She was hurt._

Harry tried to run, tried pushing through air that tugged at him with invisible fingers, through an atmosphere that felt like syrup and slowed him down. The curling vines reached tendrils towards him as he ran among them, stroking his legs like tiny hands, clinging, wrapping around his calves and tangling his legs. They tightened their grip, slithering around his ankles as the sky whirled faster overheard.

 _Give up_ , the air seemed to mock him, _you can't save her. She's going to die here._

He fell with a strangled cry, lightning shooting through the sky and striking beside him, blinding him as the world turned bright white. He heard Sara sobbing amongst the deafening crackle of of the strike, heard her call his name, but when he opened his eyes she was gone and he was surrounded by a glowing phosphorescent jungle which he knew only from photos and videos.

_Havarl._

The jungle sighed and whispered, the plants rustling and moving as they watched him; resenting his presence. The leaves pulsed a sickly green and then a violent bruised purple, changing colours before his very eyes. Further away, in the shadowed depths, vines moved among the trees. They slithered over one another, twining back and forth and undulating like huge pale worms.

Harry took a stumbling step back as the vines sensed his presence. They reached fat pale tips towards him, their ends wriggling like pale, fleshy fingers. He reeled away, pushing through the leaves and plants, ignoring them as they whispered to him; nasty things, horrible things, things he knew but didn’t want to hear. Ahead of him he caught a familiar flash of blue and white armour, heard Sara’s sobbing, and hurried on.

Then the sound of a firefight reached him, and with a sinking heart Harry realised the inevitable; it was a dream.

_The dream._

He tired to stop himself, the stay in the awful jungle with the evil whispering plants, but his feet were not his own and they drew him on.

_Stop. Please._

He didn’t want to see what came next. To relive his nightmare again, to see his own fears brought to life. Frantically, he fought the dream, tried to wake himself up.

But it didn’t work.

It never did.

Bullets ripped through the whispering plants, shredding delicate leaves and showering him in sap that stung like acid. Harry grunted as it ate into his skin, pain crawling almost delicately across his his nerve endings. _But maybe … maybe the pain would wake him from the nightmare?_

It didn't, and his dream body forced him on.

He held that damned assault rifle and ran into the battle, taking cover beside Sara as she sighted down her sniper rifle and took out a Roekaar insurgent who was shooting at them.

“Got him!” she whispered triumphantly. “Come on, we need to hurry to the rendezvous point.”

She flashed him a smile and then vaulted over a fallen tree and splashed across the river whose waters ran clear and deep.

Harry tried to yell. To warn her. To do something to stop her from crossing the damned river. But no matter how hard he yelled, he couldn't make a sound.

Instead, he followed to the bank and waited.

The first bullet took her squarely in the shoulder, and her shield generator flickered and died. The second bullet shattered her chest piece as the armour piercing round went straight through her ribs and lodged inside her chest.  
  
Sara began to scream.  
  
She screamed and screamed as the incendiary round they’d used burned her from the inside out, and smell of cooking flesh filled the clearing. He could hear the _sizzle_ and _pop_ as fat and muscle burned.

Black blood pumped from the hole in her chest, boiling from the wound. Flowing faster than Harry had ever seen. Thick and dark it splashed down her armour as she fell to her knees, sprawling on the opposite bank. She looked at him, eyes wide with surprise and pain, blood flowing from her mouth and nose.

She reached a hand towards him, her lips shaping his name even as she screamed ... and then collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

 

 

 

The screams stopped, but the blood kept coming for him in long dark fingers across the ground. It spread around her like carelessly spilled ink, and then billowed out into the merrily burbling stream in a strawberry stain that looked almost beautiful as it was carried downstream.

Harry fell to his knees, a chill freezing his insides as he watched life slip away from the woman he loved.

 _Just a dream,_ he reminded himself as he watched the happy little stream tug at her legs and pull her body into the current, sweeping her slowly downstream. Her hair spread out like that of drowned Ophelia as she slipped below the surface, her dead eyes finding his one last time.

_It’s just a dream._

_Just a dream._

Harry clawed his way from sleep like a drowning man clamouring from a deep dark well, desperately but sluggishly, half-unconscious, his head echoing with the sounds of the happy burbling stream and Sara’s screaming. He reeled and sat bolt upright in the darkness of his room, trembling, too terrified to turn on the light in case the bed beside him was empty. His mouth was dry and tasted bitter, as though it has been stuffed full of wool, and his heart hammered in his chest.

Wisps of the dream still clung to him, images of blood flowing like wine and of Sara’s unseeing eyes watching him from beneath the river water. He shuddered, bile rising in the back of his throat as he struggled to draw breath past the lump in his throat.

_To lose her … to even imagine her gone …_

 

 

 

Blindly, his hand moved to the space in the bed next to his. The space where Sara should be.

_If she wasn’t there, if he found only a cold, empty bed ..._

His hand brushed warm skin, and the tension left him in a wave. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he could see Sara’s shape curled beside him, the graceful curve of her back, the swell of her hips, the long lines of her legs, and her long chestnut hair curling across the pillow in a dark smudge.

His heart moved in a desperate kind of lurch, a hunger, and he reached out for her before he could stop himself, needing to feel the her silken skin under his palm, to lace his fingers through her hair.

To know it had been a dream.

“Mmm … Harry?” Sara woke at his touch, rolling over and blinking up at him through the shadows.

She came awake instantly as she saw his face, moving with the alertness that came with a SAM implant and the finely honed instincts of a Pathfinder. She sat up, pulled him into her arms and folded herself around him. He imagined could feel the mound of scar tissue on her breast pressing against his chest. Even through the material of the singlet top she wore, he thought he could feel it, and knew where the scar sat.

“The dream again?” Sara asked, her hands tracing soothing patterns  across his back.

Harry drew in a deep breath and forced himself to relax. “Yeah,” he finally forced out, and it was like a damn breaking. As though by speaking that one little word he broke something tight and tense inside of him and the awful rigidity in his muscles faded and more words came tumbling out. “The usual dream,” he heard himself saying. “Habitat 7 and then Havarl. I saw you die.” He shuddered, not wanting to go into details.

Sara knew. He’d told her before what it was that caused him to wake with fright, to cry out her name with such terror.

Maybe things wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been the one on duty when they’d rushed her in on the Tempest, bleeding out from a wound which Lexi, drunk at the time, had been unable to close up. He hadn’t been able to operate on Sara either. Ethically, he’d had to step back and let another surgeon work on her.

But he’d seen what they’d done to her on Havarl.

He’d seen the wound.

He’d heard Liam telling the doctor what had happened, and his mind, always so inventive, had filled in the blanks. And then he’d gone and done the stupidest thing in the world and watched the helmet cam footage of what had happened on Havarl, had seen in person what had happened.

It was all part of loving a Pathfinder, he knew that, had always known that. But seeing her almost die, knowing that this would be their life forever, it didn’t make it any easier.

“I’m okay,” she was saying softly. “You didn’t lose me. You won’t lose me, not ever.”

Harry fastened his grip, holding Sara tightly and pulling her into his lap. He nuzzled her neck as he nodded, his hands moving over her body as the atmosphere between them shifted, thickened, the need growing. She lifted her face, eyes like stars in the darkness as they glimmered with faint biotics, and then she kissed him. Their mouths met once, twice, in soft little kisses that were almost chaste, and then hunger rose up in Harry like a wave of deep, dark water; crashing over him and chasing out the numbness and fear.

 

 

 

There was only Sara now: the taste of her lips, the feel of her curves, the smell of her scent.

He wanted her.

Needed her.

The kisses deepened, became almost ferocious as she linked her legs around his waist and raked her nails down his back, as hungry as he. Hungrier. She matched his passion and surpassed it, whimpering and moaning as he tipped her back against the pillows and trapped her between his arms. They moved together; all hot breath, grasping hands, and pounding hearts.

Harry kissed his way down her neck, dipped his tongue into the hollow of her throat and nipped lightly along her jaw. She wiggled under him, giggling then sinking hands into his hair as he whisked her shirt off and turned his attention to her breasts. He cupped the fleshy mounds, kissing the rosy tips and taking first one nipple and then the other into his mouth.

He swirled his tongue around each, feeling her peaks harden in his mouth as she shuddered with pleasure. Harry grinned, and pressed his teeth against her skin, not quite biting her but applying enough pressure to leave teeth marks around each nipple, then moved lower still.

He hesitated over the scar on her chest, tracing the outline with his fingers and pressing a gentle kiss to the source of his terror, then he moved on to happier and more erotic places. His hands skated either side of her waist, following her curves and over her hips. He hooked his fingers into the waistband of her underwear, and Sara murmured his name in encouragement as he removed them and settled himself between her long slender legs.

 _By god she was beautiful._ Harry grunted as desire pounded through him and his groin swelled with need.

“Please, please!” she moaned as he kissed his way down her belly, his erection throbbing between his legs, desperate for release.

But he held off.

He wanted to taste every inch of her first. To hear Sara cry his name. To feel her shudder beneath him as he brought her to the very peak of ecstasy.

She clutched him to her as he moved his head between her thighs, her fingernails scratching his scalp. He stroked fingers along the length of her damp folds, traced her opening, and pressed feathery-light kisses to her inner thighs. His name fell from her lips in a whispered incantation, over and over, and he growled in the back of his throat as her need for him sent a surge of lust spiking through him.

He didn’t want to wait. He wanted to crawl up her body and plunge himself inside of her right now. To fuck her senseless and make her scream for him.

 _No,_ Harry told himself firmly. He had always been a man of iron control, and that wouldn’t change now. He swallowed down the beast that raged inside of him, deprived of pleasure a little while longer, and nuzzled the soft flesh between Sara’s legs.

He slipped two fingers inside of her. She was wet for him, so wet that he slipped inside of her easily, and humming with approval he licked the length of her sex with the flat of his tongue, then swirled the tip around the pearly nub at the apex of her thighs. Her hands fell away from his head, and Harry’s hazel eyes gleamed as he watched her catch up the bed sheets, knotting them fiercely in her hands as he went down on her.

He licked and nipped and sucked at her sex, his fingers moving in a slow and careful rhythm until he found the spot inside of her that made Sara writhe and cry out in pleasure. She arched against him, her hips moving in time to his ministrations, responding to his touch as though she were a finely tuned instrument and he a skilled musician.

“Harry, please!” Her hands became white knuckled, and he knew she was close. “I … I can’t-”

Finally, he relented and moved back up her body. She trembled with need under him, her pupils dilated and her lips red from his earlier kisses. Her hands skimmed his body, helping him remove his clothes, then she fell on him eagerly.

His world narrowed to Sara and the touch of her hands on his body, to the feel of her lips as she pressed kisses down his chest, the wet warmth of her tongue as it flicked over his nipples, and the sharper pain of her love bites as she nipped at his skin. She possessed him utterly, and Harry became her willing slave, unable to do more than move as she took his erection in her mouth, swirling her tongue around his tip and swallowing him down into her the depths of her mouth.

Her fingernails left red trails along his thighs as she raked her nails down his legs, marking him as hers as she bobbed over him, possessive and hungry. Harry grunted, thrusting into her mouth as she sucked, his cock tight and hot with desire. He knew he was close, too close, and with a growl he fastened a hand in her hair and tugged her back towards him.

“I need you,” he told her gruffly. “Now.”

She laughed, and it was the same laugh he’d heard from her a million times; passionate and bubbly, full of sex and confidence. “Happy to oblige, doctor.”

Sara kissed him, nipping at his lower lip and sucking on his tongue, her hand pumping along the length of his cock as she straddled him. She brought herself down on him slowly, guiding his tip to her entrance and taking him in with agonising slowness. Harry growled in the back of his throat and rolled his hips upwards to meet her warmth depths. Both of them groaned as Sara settled her weight on top of him.

“Mmm,” she kissed him. “God that feels good.” Her eyes twinkled. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

Harry snorted and wrapped an arm around her waist. “Are you ever going to get tired of saying that?”

“Nope!”

Sara flicked her tongue over his lower lip and began to move. She rode Harry slowly at first, grinding against him with little rolls of her hips that drove him wild, then sped up, moving harder and faster, squeezing her internal muscles and groaning as he thrust himself up and into her. She moved like a dancer, swaying and grinding above him, stroking his chest and thighs with a wicked little smile on her wicked little mouth.

They moved as one, their bodies twining like snakes as they rolled over so that Harry held her beneath him. He drove himself into her again and again, deep and hard, feeding the need twisting within him that screamed for more. Sara cried out, throwing her head back and arching her back, grinding against him and winding her legs around his waist.

Pleasure rose up in waves within Harry, and he dropped his head, feathering kisses along Sara’s neck and collar bone, nipping the skin lightly as she moaned and writhed. Her body tightened around his as he fucked her, and he heard her breathing come quicker, felt her body tremble as he reached between her legs and stroked her clit in time to his strokes.

“Harry! Oh god!” She came beneath him, moaning his name.

Harry hilted himself inside of her as his own ecstasy welled up in a towering wave, boiling hot and almost painfully good. The pleasure that poured over him as he lost himself inside of her was dizzying, and he groaned, burying his face in her neck as he came.

Afterwards they lay together in sweaty afterglow for several minutes, and he traced gentle hands over Sara’s back, following the curves of her muscles. He pressed kisses to her neck and shoulders and rubbed one leg along hers, cuddling her close as she nuzzled his neck affectionately.

“I hate being away from you,” she murmured into the quiet of the room, “but it’s always worth it to come home to that. I just wish,” she broke off, and sighed. “I just wish I could take those dreams away. I hate that you have nightmares because of _this…_ .”

He felt her hands move as she touched the scar on her chest.

“I know. I guess I should probably talk to someone,” Harry said, though even as the words left his lips, he knew he wouldn’t. “But I much prefer this kind of therapy. The intimate kind with you.”

She chuckled huskily and lifted herself on one elbow, glancing down at him. “You can work through your problems with me any time you like, it’s very therapeutic for me too.”  Sara ran a hand through his hair and then leaned down and kissed him. “But if the dreams get too much-”

“They’re just dreams,” Harry caught her close and pulled her back down into his arms. “It’s reality I care about, and I have all the reality I need right here.”

They sank back down onto the bed again as he kissed her, lost in one another and wrapped up in sensation. When Harry finally fell back asleep again, hours later with Sara nestled in his arms, his dreams were of soft lips, firm curves and red kisses.

 

The End

* * *

 

_A/N - Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the fic and Seokanori's lovely art! Feedback and comments are always very welcome._

 


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